Computer

This is a sequel to a post I made 7.5 years ago, the last time I built a computer (“Hades”) from scratch. The only parts that failed from my last build are all built by companies that are now out of business (Abit, OCZ), so that’s good. (I don’t count harddrives, those must eventually fail.) My new computer will be named Thailog, and will be composed of:

Like this:

So the other day, I needed to drag a window from my secondary monitor to my primary monitor (tv)…

But the secondary was off, so I wouldn’t be able to put my mouse on the window (beucase I couldn’t see it)…

And I didn’t want to get up to turn it on….

So I used VNC to VNC to myself, and did it that way. This means I had a window on my desktop that was my entire computer. So there were 2 copies of everything. And if I moved my mouse pointer inside the VNC window, it would attempt to move my mouse pointer to the same place it was pointing to on the window within.

Sure, it was hard for awhile, fighting the fact that my mouse was trying to be in two places at once.

Remember IRC? It was the first thing I did when I got on the internet in 1992 at Virginia Tech — and the first time I’d done it legally. Funny stuff you could do with the mIRCIRC client. You could have a custom quit message. For example, you could type:

/quit gotta go to work

and then it would say to everyone else in the channel:

ClintJCL (192.168.0.1) quit the channel (gotta go to work).

Wanting to out-do everyone else, I thought it would be funny to say something offensive to a lot of people. Especially since they can’t kick you from the channel — because you just quit! But I wanted my solution to be technically impressive too, so I scripted up random twisted sentences, by creating some text files that would be pieced together, almost like a Mad-Lib. That way, I could leave, and it would automatically come up with hilarious/crazy/sick/twisted things.

Here are some actual examples:

ClintJCL (192.168.0.1) quit the channel (sold children to pimps (who will make whores out of them), while they slowly bled to death).ClintJCL (192.168.0.1) quit the channel (got a blow job from your fat mom while on the floor of congress).

ClintJCL (192.168.0.1) quit the channel (sold children to cannabalistic African tribes, where they will slowly starve to death)

ClintJCL (192.168.0.1) quit the channel (got a rim job from your fat mom in front of the Queen Of England).

It was also set up so that about 5% of the time, it would make political statements, quote Sabbat lyrics, or Praise “Bob” …. but I’m not including those in this blogpost. This blogpost is about funny things I’ve said dynamically and programatically; not static things I’ve said. :)

I will include the actual contents of the files at the bottom of the post. But here is the list of the files themselves:

FunnySentenceEndings.lst: Tacked on to the ends of sentences to make them funnier. (while in the whitehouse, on national television, in front of 22 cops, in front of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir)

everything's funnier in front of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir!

SadSentenceEndings.lst: This could have been in the same file as FunnySentenceEndings, but I randomly decided whether it would be funny or sad. Sad ones included “while they begged for death’s sweet release”, “while they slowly bled to death”, “where they will spend the rest of their lives in misery”, and such.

…And the most twisted filename of all: ThingsToSellChildrenInto.lst (sweatshops, sexual slavery, etc – check out the full file below)

Sell them into smoking advertising! HA HA!

HatedPeople.lst: Only used from within FunnyPeopleToHaveSexWith.lst (because it’s funny to have sex with hated people) and FunnySentenceEndings (because it’s funny to do things in front of the mom’s of hated people). Osama Bin Laden was in this list. I really could have made this a nice, long list if I’d really tried.

And now, past the jump, the contents of the files themselves… But first, a Sloth!

This is actually related to the discussion. Back in the IRC days, my name was _Vengeance_. Needing to win wars against other people's scripts, I ended up running several other clients, including _Wrath_, _Sloth_, and _Avarice_. Well, someone sent this sloth.jpg file to me randomly once! Paranoid people will never experience the joys that can be had by automatically accepting unattended file transfers from strangers!

Had a dream that re-visited a real-life problem I’d been trying to crack for a couple decades: Converting my Apple2 software/disks to PC format.

This was always impossible in real-life because PC drives were not capable of reading Apple2-format disks. But around 2004 or so, someone finally figured it out: You need a DOS box with *two* 5.25″ floppy drives (and a harddrive). The software splits the various signals between the two floppy drives, tricking the PC drive into using [incomplete?] signals to actually be able to read an Apple2 disc.

Again, this is all a real-life issue. I’d been grabbing dead computers from parents’ and such, but none tended to have 5.25″ drives anymore–everyone switched to 3.5″ drives in the early 1990s, and it’s 20 frickin’ years later.

So anyway, in the dream, I was trying to crack this problem again. I was home at my parents’ house… It felt like a college summer-vacation or something, and perhaps it was. Perhaps the dream-within-the-dream was in the mid-1990s. I’m unsure of the barrier between the two, other than that I knew it was a dream within a dream. Our Apple2 had a modem, and I decided to call some BBSes like I used to on college summer breaks in real-life.

This is the point that I should have realized this was a dream: Had I had a modem on my Apple2, I would have been able to, in theory, use 2 disk drives, imaging the 1st disk onto the 2nd drive, then uploading the image to a PC of mine, using 2 phone lines (which we had). This is actually something I asked my dad for in real-life many many times, and he always refused, thus me still having dreams about the prospect 20 years later.

So anyway, in dreamland, I get on the Apple2 and call some BBSes and such. At some point, I wake up from the dream-within-a-dream, and am just in the dream, which is in the present (2012), and not in the mid-1990s. In the dream, I have woken up from the dream-within-the-dream, and realize I need to get cracking on making this conversion project finally happen.

So in this outer-layer dream, I realize that I need to research the software required to do that. On the software’s web-page, there are a few sample diskette images… Including one uploaded by my friend Angel, which had something to do with bypassing an interrupt on the Apple2. Despite the fact that I am using http:// to contact a webpage (still on an Apple, for some reason), a sysop breaks into sysop chat with me, just like in the BBS days. We talk about the problem, and I probably talk about the fact that I can only find one 5.25″ floppy drive, and haven’t been able to find another.

I wake up — this time, in real life. (The rest of this post is all in real life.)

I am quite agitated that this problem still has not been solved. I realize I can’t get back to sleep while thinking about this, and leave Carolyn in bed to go tinker with our old 486 DOS box that I have. It has a 5.25″ floppy drive and a 3.5″ floppy drive and a 1G harddrive. It has 8M (megs, not gigs) of RAM: 1/1000th of the ram of computers these days typically have. It has a turbo button. The harddrive has jumpers in THREE different places. I try to boot up, but it fails. We still have one “real” computer with a floppy drive: Carolyn’s 2004ish computer, which is still her primary computer. I download a bootable floppy image from http://bootdisk.com, and “burn” it to the disk. The 3.5″ drive still doesn’t boot. I go to our spare-hardware bookshelf, looking through my stack of 8 or so discarded 3.5″ floppy drives. Since computer fashion was white in the 1990s, and black in the late 2000s, I pick the only black drive, assuming that it’s newer. This one correctly boots up the floppy.

I still can’t access the harddrive. I take it out, and painstakingly write down the number of heads, cylinders, sector size, jumper configurations: Taking up a whole sheet of paper. I mess with a few configurations and can’t get the drive to be recognized. Finally, *while the computer is on*, I plug in the power to the harddrive, because I’ve passed the point of caring anymore. A big blue spark makes me jump, and shuts the power of the computer off: I overloaded the power supply, shutting everything down. This can be doom for a computer, but instead, I try booting up again, and for the first time, it works! IT’S ALIVE!

And it’s even been Clintified: It has a bootup 1-key menu to run cool programs like AcidWarp, Plaswave, and LSDino. I will use this to run a screen during parties!

So now all I need is a 2nd 5.25″ floppy drive. So I was going to a party the day I woke up with this dream… And decided to write on the wall of the party event, “If anyone has a 5.25″ floppy drive that they could give me… It would really make my day.”

And then…. a cool dude named Tom actually brought a drive, and gave it to Paul, who gave it to me!

So I got to go home with the drive I needed THAT DAY… Because of a fucking dream!

[IMDB link] [Netflix link] This post is both a movie review, and a review of a BBS I used to frequent. This is kind of a weird post.

HAIKU REVIEW: Where The Wild Things Are:
The BBS was better [*personal explanation at the bottom of the post]
than the dumb movie.

UNCOMFORTABLE PLOT SUMMARY (inspired by this): [highlight for spoilers]→Doormat mom forces us all to sit through romp in brat’s imagination.

PEOPLE: Directed by Spike Jonze, writer of many Jackass episodes and movies, and director of Adaptation and Being John Malkovich. Starring an annoying kid, Catherine Keener (Being John Malkovich), and various voices used for the creatures – Lauren Ambrose (Six Feet Under redhead daughter, Psycho Beach Party), James Gandolfini (The Sopranos)

QUIRKS: Based on a book. Which has like, no story. I got it around age 30 but have still never read it.

VISUALS: NOT the visual masterpiece you’d expect. I watched it in 1080p, but still.

The CGI faces were only because the puppets didn’t work right, but honestly, I’m having a hard problem imagining puppets looking as good. I saw hints of people in the characters — individual features that reminded me of actors, without me really knowing who. Kind of like the effect from the movie Beowulf. The goat really reminded me of Seth Green, too, for some reason. I’m not sure if puppets could really give the human realism to the expressions.

BAD STUFF: Watching a bratty kid for 2 hours. I was warned of this. I thought it was just the haters hatin’, as usual. But they were right.

Every adaptation of anything to a movie [including a previous movie] is hated on pretty badly. The haters would be much more persuasive if they only hated sometimes, instead of all of the time. Instead, I just kind of ignore it, unless a good reason or explanation is given. I didn’t listen to them, and for once, they were right and I agree with ‘em. I *wanted* to like this so much more than I did. I really wanted to give it 3 stars, just for sating my curiosity on what a Where The Wild Things Are movie might look like. Even Carolyn could only barely give it 3 stars, but alas, I could not. I’m not even sure what my specific problem was with it: It was just kind of dull and pointless, even with the fantasy elements.

MOVIE QUOTE: Judith: “Happiness isn’t always the best way to be happy.”

FRIENDS’ RATINGS:Ian loved it. Glen didn’t like it. For once, I agree with his hatin’.

PERSONAL ANECDOTES:

[*] I never heard of Where The Wild Things Are until I was online in the local BBS community in the late 1980s, and encountered a BBS of the same name, run by one Link The Triune. Carolyn was there the whole time, as was her sister, Jeremy Turner, and many other friends who I went on to know in person in college and afterward. It was definitely the best social BBS in Prince William County.

It was so popular that you would often have to auto-dial tons of times just to not get a busy signal. After all, it was one-at-a-time use back then. Imagine a webpage you can only go to if nobody else has it on their screen. And being restricted to connecting only to those pages in your county. [Unless you had ways around long distance fees. <sly grin>] The one good thing was that long distance rates meant you weren’t competing with everyone in the country; just those in your area code. Nonetheless, this BBS was a constant busy signal because of how good the messages and users were.

I eventually convinced everyone to adopt an offline reader so that less phone time was used per-user. Instead of being connected while you read and type all your messages, you simply connected for few minutes to upload the messages you wrote, and download new messages. Kinda analogous to POP email retrieval. This actually meant that 5 people could login in a row, download new messages, log off, and all be typing at once! Pretty soon, the BBS was getting messages at a faster rate than if someone was connected 100% of the time typing as fast as they could. It was tough to keep up!

I don’t really remember a lot of the specifics from back then; it was 20 years ago. I remember I’d have to catch up and reply to various things I wanted to reply to, so it basically meant that in every message section, I’d post about 3-10 times in a row each visit. Massively-deep quoting. Macros. QModem and then Telemate. Line noise. 16 colors of text. IBM extended ASCII characters. ANSI. So many things that just don’t come into play these days. Everything’s been normalized into this mundane interface. Facebook is like everyone having their own BBS, networked with everyone else’s BBS: But with no control, and absolute homogeny in interface. It’s a fascist dictator that gets things done efficiently. But BBSes were like cowboys in the wild west. Very good times.

I have set up a few of people’s “goodbye” messages that they wrote when the board shut down. They can be found at:http://clint.sheer.us/bbs/wtwta.
They include goodbyes from sysop Link The Triune (Jerry H), Magic Mist (Carolyn), Satan (me), Trailblazer (Dave Pi), Stiletto (John Sch), The Screaming Ogre (Mike P), Stray Toaster, Jam Jobe (Jeff N), Punkin, and Ditto.

There is also a subfolder called “ANSIs“, for some of the ANSI art that I converted to PNG files. I’ve included these in this post, but they are slightly shrunken down here.

As for the book? I never did read it. Eventually, we were gifted some stuffed animals from it, and one came with a tiny (2-inch?) version of the book. I still never bothered to read it.

Maybe now I will… Because it probably won’t be nearly as annoying as the movie.

I think this ANSI captures the twisted mindset some of us had at the time (and still do):

OH HERE’S A GREAT STORY!

There was another BBS, run by a Dave Pi aka Trailblazer, named after the ALL (ex-Descendents) album, called The Paisley Underground:

It was one of the few 301 BBSes I called, since I couldn’t, technically, call 301 without incurring massive fees. [Special thanks to corporation-that-shall-not-be-named and Fenris Wolf, you know who you are.]

this ANSI has nothing to do with this

There was this user, Batman. He was a really immature kid. And considering most of us were in high school or college around then, it’s saying a lot if EVEN HIGHSCHOOLERS think you’re immature.

As a co-sysop with level 254 access, what did I do? I reduced his access from the standard level 20, to level 19. I created a message base that required level 20 access, where everyone could make fun of him. I then edited his account, to set all his colors to black on black. I then logged his keystrokes, and posted messages [in the message base he couldn’t access] showing him hitting keys and trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

This was one of the awesomest ways I ever fucked with someone in my life. Oh, he could see his login prompt. But once he logged in, it was all black on black. And this was the DOS days. It’s not like you could highlight the text and paste it into notepad to read it, like you can nowadays. I don’t even think we had cut and paste back then.

An ANSI was even created in my honor — the only time this ever happened:

This ANSI appears to be about someone, too, but I have no recollection of the story behind it:

Everyone was always obsesses with spam — even before emails and spam emails existed:

In general, the socializing online was much more quaint, stylized, and personable. Nowadays, the giant borg of Facebook has swallowed us all, normalizing our experiences into one common experience with no real separate personality for people. The 2012 way definitely brings more people together in a more technologically efficient way, but the 1988 way was like living as a pioneer in the wild wild west.

Those days shall never be reclaimed, and only those of us that were there will know exactly what it was like. If you haven’t called a Commodore 64 BBS running at 300bps, you haven’t had the full online experience — and never will. If you haven’t wardialed thousands of numbers looking for hidden BBSes and strange modems, well… I’ve seen a command and control system for a sattelite that I shouldn’t have. You just don’t get to do things like this nowadays. Sigh.

I should probably write more, but I don’t know what to add. Maybe some old members of the BBS will find this post and write some memories. If you do find this, don’t forget to read the goodbye messages everyone left.

This was the most intense and fun message-based BBS I was ever on in my life — my own BBS On Earth As It Is In Hell (which ran after WTWTA went down) finishes in 2nd place for me. And seemed to be the refuge for ex-WTWTA’ers.

opening ANSI art to my BBS

I’m not going to go into the whole “not the internet … busy signals … one person at a time” spiel about BBSes, but anyway, there were lots of message boards (forums), and in one of them, the topic of duck penises came up.

WHY AREN'T YOU STOMPING?!?

Apparently, according to this conversation, male ducks’ penises are retracted inside of their body.

But of course, the conversation took a turn for the worse, and ultimately, we realized that if you stomped a duck to death, its penis would come out.

Where the FUCK is my free penis?!?! I'm writing my congressman!

Thus, the phrase “Stomp On Ducks And Win A Free Penis” was born.

COLLEGE

The second person to help etch this into my mind was Arlo Guthrie, my dorm roommate for my 3rd semester in college.

the door to our dorm room

the interior of our dorm room

He had a performance of a piece he wrote, which was a collection of short stories.

He asked me for a title. I provided him with one. Of course I volunteered Stomp On Ducks And Win A Free Penis. It was too great a phrase to die; this meme had to reproduce.

Valerie instructs us on the proper way to stomp a duck penis.

I didn’t realize he was going to make me stand up and tell everyone its origin. I’m really bad a public speaking. I think I was full of adrenaline, and then pretty much shaking as I had to address everyone.

NOOOOO!!!!!

And thus, another 50 people had that phrase stuck in their head for awhile.

Ultimately, I found it on my harddrive and emailed it to him. He had lost his files, and I had found mine. ARLO.DOC or somesuch thing. Opened it up, nice to see what it was.

When talking about it in email, he said: “I mentioned this to my wife recently. Her response was something to the effect of, “I wouldn’t have dated you in college.” She’s right.”

College.

Anyway, I recently realized that if you Googled the phrase, Google came up with nothing. I immediately tweeted it so that google would have it. And now I’m writing up the long explanation, for posterity. The End. (more…)